CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; One Classic Ballet, Many Interpretations

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Published: July 5, 2011

We dance, of course, for joy. But ballet, with its built-in dichotomy of gender roles (women alone rise on point, men alone may do the partnering), has a romantic tension that can seem poignant, even tragic. The full-length ''Swan Lake'' alternates between scenes of celebration (Acts I and III) and romantic tragedy (Acts II and IV), and its classicism can express the tragic dimension in ways that are the very stuff that ballet is made of and yet are singular to this ballet. It's not just romantic and noble, it's fateful and laden with doom. And the storm Tchaikovsky composed in Act IV becomes as cosmic as the one in Shakespeare's ''King Lear.''

Thanks to the movie ''Black Swan,'' the full-length ''Swan Lake'' is more in demand than ever. New York ballet companies have been cashing in: American Ballet Theater's annual week of ''Swan Lake'' at the Metropolitan Opera House just ended, and this year New York City Ballet arranged, first, one batch of ''Swan Lakes'' near the end of its winter season and has programmed another to start its fall season.

Such is the theatrical power of Tchaikovsky's score that all kinds of treatments flourish. The story has been retold in umpteen different ways, the score rearranged in numerous orders, and the setting is adjusted from anywhere between the Middle Ages (which Tchaikovsky intended) and the early 1960s.

Between the late 1940s and late 1980s a number of ballet versions -- notably those of the Royal (or Sadler's Wells), Kirov (or Mariinsky) and Bolshoi Ballets -- conveyed the high-tragic aspect of the ballet: the performances of the double heroine Odette-Odile by Margot Fonteyn, Maya Plisetskaya, Natalia Makarova and other stars took the art form to grand peaks. A marvelous supplement to the Royal Ballet's 2009 DVD is its ''Four Swan Queens'' discussion, with veteran dancers Beryl Grey (who first danced the ballet in the Second World War), Monica Mason, Lesley Collier and Marianela Nu?(who dances it today).

It's New York's loss that neither of its foremost ballet companies -- New York City Ballet nor American Ballet Theater -- currently has a production that does this classic ballet justice. The problem, admittedly, is not only local. There are obvious flaws in the Bolshoi Ballet production (a 2010 performance has now been handsomely broadcast in high definition in cinemas, most recently on June 19) and the Royal Ballet's (which I saw in three performances this spring). But those two productions have serious merits, whereas the leading American productions simply trivialize the ballet.

The tragedy of ''Swan Lake'' is its tale of metamorphosis: the heroine must alternate between swan and human form. Yet Peter Martins's staging at City Ballet fails to make anything of the classic moment when Odette, as Act II ends, seems to start changing before our eyes back into a mighty bird as she leaves the stage. Kevin McKenzie's 2000 version at American Ballet Theater, by contrast, not only hammers home Odette's ornithomorphic predicament but also makes the sorcerer Rothbart a Jekyll-and-Hyde persona too: now a dangerously gallant cavalier, next a hideous creature from the Green Lagoon (played by another dancer).

Rothbart -- this ballet's Mephistopheles -- has become the ''Swan Lake'' character that no current production presents seriously enough. At City Ballet, most ludicrous of all, he is an old-style operatic devil in a cloak lined with flaming orange. At the Royal Ballet he is costumed to look like a large lump of diseased moss. At the opposite extreme, the Bolshoi makes him the prince's all-dancing shadow and nemesis, the black to his white. Especially in the performance by the bizarre but ever-enthusiastic Nikolay Tsiskaridze on the recent broadcast, he becomes so campily intrusive that he limits the impact of poor, passive Odette.

For many in the audience, though, all ''Swan Lake'' needs to be momentous is a stylish corps de ballet, an expressive ballerina and a princely hero. In the performances this year at both the Royal and Ballet Theater, the corps of swan maidens -- excellently drilled -- moved many. I find, however, that ''Swan Lake'' is not ''Swan Lake'' unless the corps dances with an element of heroic strain -- notably in the downward wing beat of the arms. Today, alas, ''Swan Lake'' arms are universally diluted by softly pliant elbows.

The least problematic element in modern companies is almost always the hero, Prince Siegfried. This June it was particularly gratifying to catch Ruslan Skvortsov in the Bolshoi's broadcast (just the way he stood and walked beautifully encapsulated the heroic aspects of the role) and, at Ballet Theater, David Hallberg, who, more than any other male dancer today, embodies the sense that this story is the prince's knightly quest for aspects of his own soul.

When Sara Mearns dances Odette-Odile at City Ballet, we're never in doubt that she's confronting her destiny. To an extraordinary degree she makes the choreography both intimate and grand, and an unfolding drama of suspense. Nobody I saw at the Royal Ballet was in this league, but the performances by Ms. Nu?(especially) and Lauren Cuthbertson were each gripping and lustrous. The Bolshoi's Mariya Aleksandrova, on film, danced the role quite differently: her bleak authority makes the ballet a study in expressive deadlock, handsomely but unchangingly caught between fear and hope.

At Ballet Theater last week I knew no more about Polina Semionova by the end of her performance than at the end of her ''Don Quixote'': she does everything but reveals nothing. Veronika Part's Odette, by contrast, is powerfully sentimental, with searching gazes into her prince's eyes and a fond clutch of his hand to her cheek. Her dancing has a number of beautiful thick-as-cream legato moments -- and it certainly has heroic strain -- but is inclined toward monotony. Nobody made more of Odette's Act II exit than Michele Wiles (in what proved to be her farewell performance with the company), her arms suddenly beating the air with increasingly urgency.

Of the performances I saw last week, the most remarkable was that of Gillian Murphy. Only last year she had given a sour, flashy performance of the role. Last Tuesday, partnered by Mr. Hallberg, she was compelling. Even when her interpretation or her choice of text seemed misguided, she showed a grandeur and power that surely were a new high for her. In the coda of her Act II solo she suddenly added a soft out-of-the-blue triple pirouette that had the audience gasping aloud not because of its virtuosity but because of its unexpected rightness: it heightened Odette's light. New York is lucky to have artists of her and Ms. Mearns's caliber. Too bad they must be seen in such tawdry productions.

PHOTOS: Sara Mearns dancing this year in the New York City Ballet production of ''Swan Lake'' at the David H. Koch Theater. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (C1); David Hallberg of the American Ballet Theater as Prince Siegfried in ''Swan Lake.'' (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREA MOHIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (C7)